Las ideas linguísticas del siglo XVIII en Lorenzo Hervás: la descripción de las lenguas del mundo

Laburpena

Hervás' views on Romance and Spanish linguistics, his ideas about substratum and his influence on the dissemination of the knowledge of American Indian languages have already been studied by Lázaro, Coseriu, and Tovar. In this article, the author focuses on Hervás' attempts to uncover the artificio gramatical or grammatical mechanism of language. By artificio of language, Hervás means their peculiar morphology, word order or syntax, writing system and pronunciation. Several of his linguistic descriptions are exemplified here. Thus, the author shows how H ervás accounts for a number of particles in the Chilean language, how he makes a typology of numerals based on a variety of world languages and how he identifies the morphemes of the Lord's Prayer in Quechua. Hervás collects grammars and data from languages around the world through previous missionaries' works and other religions language informants. His data description foreshadows late- nineteenth and twentieth century work in the area of linguistic typology and morphosyntactic analysis.